MAL Ep. 18
In these two sessions, the party searched for the missing Seven Quinn in the apparently gang-plagued city of Ruastin. 1) They reported back to Eyewoman Terreira about their fight with the devils by the Abyssal gate. Terreira expressed surprise that devils would be using an Abyssal portal, and the party told her that the Keres may be allied with Chavalk, which concerned her greatly. 2) As the party passed the church of Tallian, the saw a group of elves walking down te steps expressing frustration that the authorities in Ruastin were all too distracted by local concerns like the tax fraud, the bomb scare at city hall, and Petros arrest to take their concerns about something seriously. The party approached them and told them about Seven's abduction, which they appeared not to know anything about. They declined to tell their own business to random human strangers and a drow, but did give Jon a letter to send the Ducal Emissary in Hastenport and gave their inn room address. 3) The party asked Kalima about Captain Ames, getting the response that he was a pragmatic man trying to preserve a delicate balance between the police, the Ducal guards, and the two main underworld gangs of Ruastin. She says he is known to look the other way on certain gang activities, but does not believe he would tolerate anything involving extraplanar attacks or causing social disorder. Jon also asked her about Piper's curse, about which she could only suggest asking Beyond Jessery. 4) The group talked to Beyond Jessery, but due to her apparent connection with Dayant Arakin and the League of Snakes, decided not to ask her about Piper or about Seven. Instead they asked about Skenebrax, and learned that the plague he had been spreading is called the Marigold Shakes and is not necromantic in nature. Jessery also mentioned having observed strange necromantic energies from the old Tenarri tomb in the south of town, but that the paladins had detected no evil there and they had left it alone. 5) The group talked to Captain Ames, who told them about a conflict between a local thieves guild and a gang that was visitng from Rivercity. Expressing concern that Seven could be killed in the crossfire if the Rivercity gang had her and the thieves guild attacked, he gave the party his tacit approval to go in looking for her, preferably leaving them thinking it was a local gang. Ames also mentioned to the party that a local gossip named Gabrielle had been asking all over town about three horses with a girl on one of them, and provided her address. 6) The party decided to take on the Rivercity gang disguised as a gang of killer clowns with bad New York accents. While in disguise, they first stopped at a brothel and bribed the pimp to tell them about the Rivercity gang, which he evidently knew nothing about, then went to the gossip Gabrielle's house and terrorized her for a bit until she told them that she got the information about the three horses with a girl on one of them from her neighbor Messana, who Jon had asked if she had seen such a group. So that turned out to be a dead end--just a rumor the party had spread themselves getting back to them, not an actual Seven sighting. 7) Then the party, disguised as clowns, went to the Rivercity gang headquarters and broke in. Apparently expecting an attack, the thieves did not fight back but instead tried to use total defense, tumbling, and the deployment of traps to escape. Two escaped successfully, but the party killed one and captured three others, learning from them that they were in town to rendezvous with the drow necromancer Thrane Do'Ezzen and that they had been warned to stay away from someone called "The Hidden Ones." 8) During the attack, an arm shot out from the eye sigil on Khirg's back as he maneuvered past Aler, phasing through his ribcage, causing him to fall unconscious, and teleporting him somewhere. He regained consciousness in a black-tiled room with a fiend who demanded to know who had demonmarked Aler and tortured him with hellfire and a deepsteel blade when he refused to answer. An illithid rescued him by shooting the fiend in the back with a holy blaster, revealing herself as a tiefling planeblazer named Tisha Lake with a shapeshifting amulet. She also told Aler some information about his family, in particular that he could have inherited the demonmark from his mother because demonmarks follow bloodlines and that Aler's father had killed Tisha's mother. 9) The group returned to Terreira and asked for her help in finding Aler. She said she could try to fast track the analysis of the day's extraplanar travel incidents for the party, and enlisted a fellow Eyeman to cast Locate Creature for the party. Surmising that Aler was probably not on the plane from the broken empathic bonds with his animal companions, they used both castings of the spell on Seven, failing to find a trace of her from either the northern or southern ends of the city. The Eyemen said this could mean anything from Seven being dead, to being shielded from scrying, to being on the other side of the river (running water blocks the spell.) 10) Meanwhile, Aler and Tisha were escaping from the ethereal plane, where Aler had apparently been imprisoned. With Tisha disguised as an illithid and Aler acting like her mind-controlled slave, the pair bluffed their way past a crystalline fey giant and a little fairy dragon to escape out the window of the tower to a location from which Tisha would be able to plane shift them back to Ruastin. Aler then failed a fortitude save and succumbed to the pain of his injuries, passing out. 11) The party then went to Messana's house and asked her whether she had any magical means of locating Seven or Aler. Messana asserted that her coven could use the Vision spell to reveal visions of past events even when they don't involve a target of legendary status, contrary to the rules-as-written spell description. The party decided to trust her and made a deal that they would remove the undead monster haunting her grove in exchange for the casting of this spell. Messana sealed her pledge by sticking her hand into a burning brazier, the creepy weirdo. 12) Tisha revived Aler with a healing potion, revealing them to now be in the Land of the Dead--the only location she had been able to safely shift to quickly enough. She apologized for teasing him about being unable to carry her and revealed her demonic heritage, then asked his advice about getting past a valley filled with ghosts to a spot she could safely bring them through to Ruastin. Using their stealth skills and Aler's ranger abilities versus the undead, the two of them managed to first sneak and then run past the ghosts, at which point Tisha shifted them both to Ruastin where they were reunited with the rest of the party. 13) Tisha explained to the group that she had been on the ethereal plane looking for a family friend who had been kidnapped, revealing herself to be Barris Wainwright's daughter and the family friend to be Seven, who the party told her they were also seeking. Tisha told the party she had infiltrated the ethereal tower because there seemed to be infernals there and she had identified the devils that attacked the party at the ruins, so she guessed they might be related. However, she did not find any trace of Seven in the tower--only Aler, who she knew of through her father and decided to rescue instead. Then party decided to invite her to join forces with them. 14) Then the party picked up Terreira and went to the witches' dance copse to look for the undead menace. Once they cast darkness, the creature emerged--it was large, toothy, and intensely black, but appeared to be trying to communicate, not fight. The party attempted to use Speak With Dead to converse with it, but just like the witches said, the spell yielded only static. After some unsuccessful attempts to communicate using charades, the party tried Comprehend Languages and realized they could understand some of what it was saying, then had Terreira cast Tongues on Zadkiel. Apparently the monster, which called itself "Not-Star," was trying to find the King of Malachi to parlay with about an elder chaos that was awakening. Zadkiel explained that there is no king of Malachi, which the being responded to enthusiastically and called him "King Zadkiel the Not-King." Even with Tongues, it was a little difficult to communicate with this being, but the party managed to piece together that it was trying to ask who the allies arrayed against Chavalk's confederation were, and felt that the allies you were able to describe to it were too few. Jon tentatively identified Not-Star as a being from the Negative Material Plane, a plane which is completely unsurvivable to humankind and whose denizens are nearly unknown. Not-Star ended the interaction by slashing Zadkiel with a black bone blade that sprang from its stomach, causing wracking pain, however Zadkiel was the first to admit that he had sort of brought that on himself by telling the creature that his blood needed to be shed in order for them to communicate. It certainly didn't seem angry, concluding the conversation with "This... alliance... is unprecedented," and disappearing. 15) The party told Messana that the creature was gone and that she should fetch them again if it ever came back, and Messana kept her side of the bargain by bringing her coven to cast a gestalt spell in the dance copse. Jon played wild music to accompany their dance, causing several PCs to dance uncontrollably. (For the future, Scott is correct, the save DC should be half levels + CHA bonus-- in Jon's case that would be a 10. On this particular occurence, the save DC was 17 due to the amplifying effect of the witches' dance.) 16) The question asked of the vision was "Where was Seven Quinn five minutes ago?" They received a vision of a magically darkened room, in which Aler, Khirg and Zadkiel were able to identify what looked like an illithid standing behind an altar, but no sign of Seven. Before the duration ended, Jarth alertly redirected the vision with the question "How did she get there," which showed Seven riding through the Abyssal gate on a horse with a man in purple robes, alond with two other horses carrying the succubus that had attacked Jon earlier and a large man with blue woad lines on his face and torso, to whom the eye sigil on the wall spoke and said "It is watched" in the Fey language. Neither the robed man nor the man with woad lines pinged Jon as extraplanar, and Zadkiel identified his robes as those of a priest of Sesharet. The vision quickly faded at that point. 17) The group returned to Captain Ames and did not directly admit to having attacked the Rivercity gang, but said they had heard the Insane Clown Posse had done it. Ames, to his credit, seemed more concerned about whether Seven had been rescued in the raid. The party gave him the description of the three perps they just divined, and Ames sent an officer out to question all the gate guards. 18) Finally, the party went to the Tenarri tomb Beyond Jessery had told them about, having first gotten corroboration from the Paladins that they had visited the site with her earlier this week but had not gone inside. Though there was no undead presence obvious from the outside of the tomb, Aler's tracking turned up a slight undead trace against one of the trees a short distance from the tomb, as if an undead creature had brushed against it at some point recently and some negative energy had rubbed off there. He was not able to determine more than that. The door was locked, but Red and Tisha opened it by shapeshifting their hands into six-fingered form to manipulate the six-fingered handprints on the door. 19) Inside the rather gaudy tomb, the marble floor held no tracks but Red was able to pick up faint human scent (suggesting someone had been in here within the past few days.) Old incidental scents are hard to read, but she felt pretty sure these scents were neither Seven's nor Jessery's. After much trial and error, the group figured out that they needed to turn the scarab dials and stand on the heavy gold tiles to open a secret door, revealing a stone platform with another scarab dial on it which proved to be an elevator. 20) Aler, Adriel, and Zadkiel went down the elevator and into a room full of ornate pressure plates while Jon and Khirg covered them from the level above and Red hovered in the elevator in the form of a pterodactyl. The party realized that turning the scarabs on the walls caused some of the pressure plates to lock and others to unlock. Using the high-tech methods of flying around and turning the dials with mage hands and the old-school method of banging on things with a 10-foot pole, the three PCs managed to get all the way to the far wall with minimal trap damage before triggering one of the pressure plates that caused skeletons to drop from the ceiling onto them MM6-style. And there we broke for the evening, ready for combat when next we meet. Game on!